I have followed the instructions 3 times, yet I cannot get past the command line blinking cursor.I found that that binutils file (2.21 installed) does meet Nvidias requirements (2.9.5) to install the 290.5 driver. How much difference would this make?

I wish I could say the same! I do not know what I screwed up, but I was stuck at command line, and none of the solutions I tried from there did anything at all.

I finally gave up on Mint, and I have been using Mint since version 5. I installed Ubuntu, choose F6 when booting off of live CD, disable nomodeset, let Ubuntu do its thing, and I did not have to install any additional drivers after that, on first boot after install, I had my native display resolution.

I am glad others are finding the solution for NVIDIA drivers, and I appreciate the attempts here to help me out.

CapitalG wrote:worked perfectly if there is a kernel upgrade though will it break it?

The benefit of using the DKMS package (nvidia-kernel-dkms) is that when you upgrade your kernel, it should automatically trigger a re-compile of that DKMS module for the new kernel if necessary, just like it did when you installed nvidia-kernel-dkms for the first time.

So the system should keep ensuring that there's a module compiled for your installed kernels, all by itself. DKMS is cool that way.

Thanks for providing this simple, concise tutorial for installing the proprietary nvidia driver. After some unsuccessful attempts trying different tutorials, this one worked right away, with only one modification:

Important: I think that in my previous attempts the nouveau driver messed up the Nvidia proprietary driver install. In the end I was left with a text only environment, but your tutorial and the blacklisting of the nouveau driver worked out of the box and fixed the problem.